BENI, Democratic Republic of Congo (Reuters) – A female peacekeeper and five villagers were killed in an attack by an Islamist militia in eastern Congo’s North Kivu province on Monday morning, the U.N. and a civil rights group said.
“A peacekeeper was killed in an attack by alleged ADF in the Beni region,” said MONUSCO, the U.N. peacekeeping mission, which has deployed around 12,000 troops to contain violence by more than 120 armed groups in the east of the country.
A local civil rights group said separately that fighters with the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), an Islamist armed group with Ugandan origins, raided the village of Kilia killing five people.
The village, which is around 18km southeast of Beni, also hosts a temporary U.N. base.
In March the United States labelled the ADF a foreign terrorist organization because of alleged links to Islamic State group, although the U.N. has consistently downplayed the strength and nature of Islamic State’s influence in Congo.
The last peacekeeper killed in Congo was an Indonesian national on June 22 last year. More than 370 have been killed since the U.N. first sent troops during the civil war in 1999.
The ADF, which has been active in Congo since the 1990s, has carried out a string of reprisal attacks on civilians since the army began operations against it in late 2019, killing around 850 people last year, according to the U.N.
(Reporting by Fiston Mahamba, Erikas Mwisi Kambale and Hereward Holland; Editing by Hugh Lawson)
